Colleges demand a lot from their applicants: integrity and hard work, to name a couple. But do they live up to their own standards? This article in The Atlantic Wire brings up another example of how colleges succumb to many of the same pitfalls as their applicants. Every year, U.S. News collects statistics from colleges in order to publish annual college rankings. The temptation is great for colleges to game the system, moving themselves up in the rankings, and unfortunately this has been quite easy to get away with since there is little fact-checking that occurs.

U.S. News has been slowly catching on to this problem, and in a bold move has unranked a university for the first time, temporarily removing George Washington University. While George Washington is clearly at fault, as are Emory University, Claremont McKenna and others for doing the same, author David Wagner ponders deeper: "...perhaps they should reconsider their policy of publishing unverified figures that come straight from the schools that stand to benefit from inflating them. Or perhaps parents and their college-bound teens should eye these rankings with a healthy dose of skepticism." Definitely something to think about.